Google has announced that it has acquired the team behind content-sharing service Kifi as it looks to expand and improve its own group-sharing mobile app Spaces. The deal is likely to see Google begin integrating its deep search engine capabilities into Spaces as it looks to the next frontier for delivering more relevant SERPs for brands and end users.

Kifi is a startup that builds extensions to search and collates links and information in social mobile apps such as Twitter. It also provides further recommendations for useful links to other news pages, sites and products. The details about the deal have not been discussed, but Google’s engineering director, Eddie Kessler, said that the Kifi team would now work on its own group chat app.

“Delighted the Kifi team, with their great expertise in organizing shared content and conversations, is joining the Spaces team to build features that improve group sharing,” Kessler said in a Google+ post on Wednesday.

Small group sharing

Spaces launched earlier this year as a mobile chat app for users who want to share photos, articles, videos and other activities within a small group. However, its arrival was met with a lukewarm response from Android users, and it only managed to peak at 284 on the app charts in the Google Play Store, and at 577 in the iOS App Store in the United States.

The acqui-hire of the brains behind Kifi is obviously aimed at improving the execution of the app. In a Medium post, Kifi confirmed that its app will be available for a few more weeks before being phased out during the late summer. It appears that Google will now use Kifi’s tech and staff to power its future offerings.

“The mission at Kifi has always been to connect people with knowledge,” the Kifi team added. “We created a service that seamlessly enables organizing, sharing, discussing, and finding the content you and your team values, which has resulted in more flexible and intuitive collaboration across the Internet. We also spent significant time creating a service that overlays context on your browsing and sharing experiences to increase usefulness and understanding.”